There's a four-in-five chance that there's a Linux-powered smartphone in your pocket (Android is based on the Linux kernel) and plenty of IoT devices are Linux-powered too, even if you don't necessarily notice it. Devices like the Raspberry Pi, running a vast array of different flavours of Linux, are creating an enthusiastic community of makers and giving startups a low-cost way to power new types of devices. Much of the public cloud is running on Linux in one form or another, too; even Microsoft has warmed up to open-source software.

I thought Android is *not* Linux? At least that's what one of my Android text books says. It uses the Linux kernel, but is not the same operating system that is commonly referred to as "Linux" i.e. GNU-Linux. Android has major differences with Linux. This is not a value judgement but just an observation/fact.

The linux kernel is linux.Gnu/linux was the second attempt by Richard Stallman to raise awareness of GNU on the coat-tails of linux after people didn't take his first suggestion of LiGnuX seriously. Linux is not a GNU project. Their OS is called HURD.So your "fact" does not appear to actually be one despite it coming out of a book.

What is referred to today as "Linux" is an operating system that has a lot more components than just a kernel. It handles system initialization/state management, hardware resources and events, optional graphical management, etc. When someone says "I installed Linux" or "I use Linux" they mean an operating system, not a kernel. While there are variations among various Linux operating systems, they are still fundamentally similar in many ways and are different than Android in many ways.

The often do, and they are often wrong. Which is why you have people always pointing out that actually it's GNU/Linux that they are running. Technically 'Linux' only refers to the kernel, people should really just state what distro they are running, that would be more accurate.

Language is a funny thing, and it's always changing. One of the biggest ways it changes is when people generally accept a term to mean something other than its intent. The most common of these is when a brand name becomes the name of the product or service in the industry.

Laundromat, for instance, was a Westinghouse trademarked brand for an automatic clothes washer; but now it means any coin-operated, cash or credit self-laundry shop.

Oh, I think the vast majority of 'NIX users know exactly what they are using,Hell,, the closest I get to 'LINUX' is the Custom Debian based server that runs our Brunswick A2 machines that has paid support. I'm just the keyboard interface. And although I can't tell you the details of the distribution, I know what it's based on and know it is a very 'stripped down' version as the 8 computers it controls have 80486x 32bit 33mhz CPU's with the astounding amount of 4mb SIMM memory!

I ran quite a few gnu utilities on CP/M, long before Linux, but I didn't call it gnu/CPM.

Most Linux distros come with countless programs, and while many of the core OS utilities are gnu apps, many Linux apps are not gnu apps. The Bluetooth manager isn't gnu, I don't think any of the databases are gnu, and systemd certainly isn't gnu. And on and on and on.

I appreciate the works of Stallman and friends, but I think he claims a bit too much.

GNU is important. But a lot of its importance comes in providing Unix utility programs and functions to non-Linux OS's, which is only slightly above Peter Norton's taking a mess of Ward Christensen utilities and calling them "Norton Utilities". It's a valuable service, but let's remember that everyone deserves credit.

Not necessarily.On one of the few desktop systems running Linux mentionned in the summary : yes, the rest will be GNU.On most of the clusters, webservers, etc. : Yes, again, the rest will be GNU

BUT

On smartphone, with a few corner case exception (Sailfish OS, Tizen and other Maemo/Meego/Mer based OSes ; Ubuntu Touch ; in the past also HP/Palm WebOS ; etc.) everything will run a Linux kernel, but coupled with the Android user space (uses Google's own Bionic as a C library, and then runs their own "I can't bel

The definition of an OS is that it controls all resources of a computer and shares them between the applications. A single task system would not be an OS, as in a single task system the running application has full control of all resources of a computer. Thus DOS is actually a program loader, not a computer operating system.

I thought Android is *not* Linux? At least that's what one of my Android text books says.

Just because someone wrote something in a book doesn't automatically make it true. Books are not necessarily authoritative sources and I can provide you lots of examples of books getting "facts" very, very wrong. This evidently is one of them.

It uses the Linux kernel...

Then it is linux in addition to whatever else it is. The kernel above all else defines which operating system you are using.

but is not the same operating system that is commonly referred to as "Linux" i.e. GNU-Linux.

It's a variant of linux but not the only one. GNU/Linux is really not a single system but rather a marketing attempt by Richard Stallman to u

Stallman isn't taking credit for work he didn't do. Stallman is taking credit for work he did do; Stallman is taking credit for the GNU OS.

There is no GNU OS. Stallman didn't write the kernel. The kernel defines what OS it is. Ergo Stallman is trying to take credit for work he didn't do by pointing out that other work he didn't do (GNU - others wrote those tools too under the FSF aegis) was used to enable linux to be a useful product in some cases. It's not GNU/Linux as he claims. If linux didn't use any GNU tools it would still be linux.

Linux certainly did NOT win the smartphone war. Firstly, Android is built to use the Linux kernel because hooking deep into the kernel is easier than it should be (hence bugs like stagefright) and because Google doesn't have to pay for Linux. The Linux / GNU stack is vaguely available but mostly unusable on Android. Android could be ported to any other kernel that is similarly hackable / easy to kneecap security and kernel / HAL / userspace partitioning as Linux. As for iOS, it co-opts the BSD Mach kernel in a similar manner.

To naively ASSUME it would be SUPER EASY to PORT Android to another KERNEL stack is just STUPID. IT would take YEARS to be able to support the HUNDREDS of different HARDWARE PLATFORMS . Linux still isn't even there all the way with vendor hardware support, you think vendors are just going to jump and support your new OS kernel, I think not. Google's Fuchsia OS is heading for failure for this exact reason, just because it is microkernel is not a good enough reason to switch from Linux.
So Yes, Linux is WI

Your textbook is pretty dumb. it's just as much linux as your wireless router is probably linux - no, it's even more so linux than that. just because you're not using X doesnt make it non-linux - or then me and my brothers first linux installations weren't linux too(they were).

Android most definitely is Linux. you cannot separate the two. even if you're not using ndk and using only dalvik/art, you're still using linux threads and a bunch of other linux things almost directly.

I use Linux on the desktop for everything other than gaming. I dual-boot to Windows for that, and only because games developers still don't do Linux versions. The moment that changes it will be goodbye windows partition.

The desktop is a dying market except for power users, hobbyists, scientist. Business is making the shift to smart terminals and for less secure communication purposes simple disposable notebooks (no windows in site lust secure locked doors, nobody wants the employees wide open to the prying eyes of potential competitors who pay for M$ for access).

It could have been a shrinking market with windows but M$ killed that, so the desktop will become a shrinking market with Linux and of all companies, Apple, still a good solid professional market, pretty much back to its main professional market prior to consumer PCs which in reality when technology caught up is smart phones (fitted VR micro glasses for gaming), smart TVs, tablets for the smart TVs and disposable notebooks for communications (not gaming).

I'm a Steam player. Point is that once you go into Steam and pick a game, chances are that the Windows version of it is more fully featured than the Linux version. In the case of Civ VI, the Windows version is out (albeit new) but the Linux one is almost out. Other games, like Civ V - the Windows version is more fully featured than the Linux one. So right now, I play on my Windows laptop.

I'm using TrueOS (PC-BSD) and it has something called playonbsd, which is essentially running wine, and then running steam on top of it. So far, I've been unsuccessful in upgrading to the version that runs that, but once I can, then your scenario would be partly true. I'd really have loved it has Steam developed front ends for not just Windows and Mac, but also Linux and BSD.

Point is that once you go into Steam and pick a game, chances are that the Windows version of it is more fully featured than the Linux version.

I have not noticed any differences. You will need to provide proof/examples.

In the case of Civ VI, the Windows version is out (albeit new) but the Linux one is almost out.

It is out now. They tried to sell it to me last week for $49.99 which I declined.

Other games, like Civ V - the Windows version is more fully featured than the Linux one.

I have played Civ V on Windows and Linux. I failed to notice any differences. Perhaps you can provide significant details?

Long story short, if you are an intense gamer who wants to try everything, like my son, then you will use primarily Windows for games. For myself, I do not need much. DOTA, Skyrim, and Civ V eat up massive amounts of time by themselv

> I have not noticed any differences. You will need to provide proof/examples.

As much as it pains me to say it, Linux has nowhere near the support of Windows and to claim otheriwise is just ridiculous.Other than Civ6 can you name me any other big game at all from 2016 that is also out on Linux?No mans Sky? Fallout4? World of Tanks? Elite dangerous? Overwatch? The Witcher 3? Dark Souls 3? Battlefield 1? Xcom2? Tomb Raider? Forza3? literally anything for my HTC Vive?

Already well aware that Steam has some Linux games on it. None of the games I play are available under Linux yet.Currently that would be World of Tanks, Fallout 4, Elite Dangerous, No Man's sky, then about 50 other games for my HTC Vive.

Am in a similar boat. Linux is my desktop. No looking back. I use Wine for quite a number of apps that I need, and it does take some wrangling occasionally, but it's no comparison to Windows. I have a dual boot option for when I something such as to edit an image in Photoshop.

Am in a similar boat. Linux is my desktop. No looking back. I use Wine for quite a number of apps that I need, and it does take some wrangling occasionally, but it's no comparison to Windows. I have a dual boot option for when I something such as to edit an image in Photoshop.

Linux is my desktop, and has been since 1998. My kids have windows PCs, and I have an old one that has been sitting around for a while. I still haven't had to boot it up for anything.

The only time I have needed windows for anything was recently to join a webex for work. I can work from home on my linux machine, I just run a container that has openconnect and xfreerdp on it, it launches and connects me to the VPN at work, then rdp's into my machine there. But on this particular occasion, I needed to have

There are actually a decent number of titles on steam, although two or three that I very much like (Skyrim and Defense Grid come to mind) are not available. But I still haven't booted back to windows since early last year on my big fat desktop. And I have a Dell Precision that's going to end up being my main machine in the near future, that only has xubuntu on it. It works remarkably well and is nowhere near as obnoxious as Windows 10.

yea except that more than half of steam's top10 games all run on linux already. Along with the Civ games, hard to say those arent AAA, is usually always in the top10 and Im sure civ6 will return then once the hype dies down over some newly released games

All Windows has now is Direct x 12 and GPU support.
Windows 10 allows games to be created with a lot of different graphics support.
Do developers select tools that let them code for Linux, Apple, Sony and the Windows desktop?
Is it the tools, developer kits? GPU support?

Personally I think when MS add virtual desktops and change their UI back to a MS Windows7 style it will be ready for the desktop. As it is MS on the desktop just gets too cluttered.Apple have done it so MS will surely follow.

Aren't Windows people getting tired of constantly babysitting their OS? One of my computers is a dedicated gaming box, and yes, running Windows. I'm constantly upgrading packages and rebooting. Sometimes it just feels slow and and rebooting seems to fix it for whatever voodoo reason. And what's the crap with having to re-install one per year? If I don't re-install everything, the system gets slower and slower until I'm pulling my hair out. And then when I re-install, it's like I have a new fast system

This!!! I totally have this problem too. Also whats with windows just growing on its own? I have a 256 GB windows partition, every year or so Windows alone grows from maybe 30 GB to consuming a whopping 170GB, consuming about 2/3rds of my whole partition.

Yeah all sorts of crap appears over time under C:/windows, and in the %appdata% directories. *.log files etc., even if you never install anything.Trouble is its often not obvious what you can and can't safely delete.The problem wouldn't even exist if the Windows programmers didn't continue their hacky culture of just dumping their dogfood all over the system directories, or at least not assume that storage space is infinite and that log files, temp files etc never need to be deleted and cleaning them up is

I install once and unless I completely fuck up and install through my own actions I never reinstall until my next build (or OS upgrade which usually comes first and even then is more of an update)

I have yet to see this slow down thing that other people get. Honestly it seems to be people who just install all sorts of shit with no regard to what it might to do their system that experience this. I.e. all sorts of browser toolbars, add ons, services.

That property is still useful, and thus in 2017 the AT convention has survived in some interesting places. AT commands have been found to perform control functions on 3G and 4G cellular modems used in smartphones. On one widely deployed variety, "AT+QLINUXCMD=" is a prefix that passes commands to an instance of Linux running in firmware on the chip itself (separately from whatever OS might be running visibly on the phone).

I can - it was two weeks ago. I booted Windows for the first time in about 18 months to open a.doc a family member had been sent by a government department that would not format correctly in LibreOffice.

Turns out it would not format correctly in Word either! It needed Word95 or something!

Because if Google's proprietary OSes [arstechnica.com] that are more locked down than Windows ever was (say what you want about Windows but I can grab a windows laptop and inside of 10 minutes be booting into anything from BSD to Zorin OS, just try that on a Chromebook) now counts as "Linux" because it uses the kernel, which even the community acknowledges that "the kernel is not Linux"? Well sheeit, by that metric you could claim Linux "won" half a decade ago since all those cheapo locked down routers used by millions are using the Linux kernel as part of the embedded OS.

It certainly doesn't come anywhere close to being open or supporting the four freedoms so if this is what it takes to "win" I'd say "well what exactly did you "win" other than replacing one corporate master for another?

In Google's OSs, the kernel is Linux: it's the userland that is something like busybox or some other BSD licensed shell. But I think an argument would be that if you bought a netbook or laptop w/ ChromeOS already on it, then you already have Linux, so why would you want to replace it w/ another distro. Whereas someone who bought a wintel box would likely be someone who received Windows by default, and may prefer to replace it w/ something else, like TrueOS ( or PC-BSD, which I did) to one of the Linuxes

The kernel is linux. Gnome desktop, redhat distro etc etc are all their own thing.Just because people are lazy and frequently call the entire stack linux doesn't mean that someone who isn't lazy is wrong when they are talking about the linux kernel specifically.

So yes, android is dominating not redhat, debian or whatever, but the article is about the kernel underneath.

File it with people making noise about Mac versus MS Windows when the topic is really about an x86_64 CPU.

Only market droids and technodunces buy the bullshit that the userspace skin is the OS. Anybody with a slilght clue understands that an operating system does scheduling, virtual memory, manages devices, etc etc. And has a user space that can easy be mischaracterized by marketdroids.

You can get console on Android and poke around. Its Linux. Some top level dirs moved around for completely bogus reasons, but it's Linux. It runs Linux binaries.

The point Hairyfeet was making was that one of the major reasons people advocate Linux is the 4 GNU freedoms, but that is missing in the case of Chrome OS, making it just a case of substituting corporate masters.

'Takes the world' as the headline suggests is a rather sweeping statement about Linux, when a big portion of the non PC world - namely Apple - runs on different BSDs (more precisely, XNU kernels and FreeBSD userland). Only way it's true is if one conflates BSD w/ Linux, and uses the latter term

I think most people don't care. 10 years ago I was udderly shocked on here seeing all the hype about smart phones when they were new while bashing Windows. Um, hate to say it but Windows is hell of alot more open and less proprietary than a droid anyway as sad as that sounds. Don't give me the crap about source code either. The fact is carriers lock the shit out of everything.

Challenge failed [howtogeek.com] and go fuck yourself, took me all of 2 minutes to Google to find yes Virginia thanks to Google's DRM there are OSes you cannot install on a Chromebook whereas I can install ANY X86 OS on a Windows laptop...sorry but you fail.

I personally find it hard to believe Windows is losing. Are people not aware of cool new features like reporting everything you visit and type back to Microsoft for warrantless search by the government?

Yep. I'm a Windows tech, so my knowledge of Windows and certain Windows-based apps keeps me employed. I could play with Linux at home (and from time to time I do, a little), but generally speaking I'd rather fiddle for an hour fixing a Windows issue than take the time to become comfortable enough in a new environment so I can deal with its issues (Linux isn't perfect...) for a slight overall improvement in my home environment and absolutely zero utility at work.

I wonder how the desktop market share data are obtained. From browser data? This is naive as many linux users change or randomize their user agent. It must be that since counting OS sales does not work.
I use linux as my major operating system since 20 years. But there are still things I can only do on a commercial OS like Mac OS X: For example solid video editing, screen recording, Keynote, garage band, and serious gaming. But for most day to day operations, there is very little difference between OS X (when used as a Unix workstation) and linux. My desktops and workflows look almost identical. I guess, also windows could be configured today to behave like a unix workstation. But the loss of control which the the user over the OS (basic things like when and how to upgrade, or the look over the shoulder of the user) which happens today in windows makes it unfit for serious work.
What would really be nice if virtualization would exist which allowed to run any OS X software on a linux box. It seems that installing OSX on a virtual box has not yet worked well. The few who have got it to work claim slow graphics, sound failures. I have not heard for example of a successful and solid Final cut run virtualized under linux. Parallels does a good job virtualizing windows on OSX.

Cinelerra. There are many others. Cinelerra isn't easy to use, but it's soooooo powerful. I've tried many video editors but I always find myself coming back so Cinelerra due to the power. LIVES also looks promising but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet. There are even a couple of proprietary ones.

screen recording,

There are about a hundred of these. Personally I use ffmpeg because it's so ubiquitous across my machines and can be quickly invoked from the command line (e.g even via SSH while I'm mid-game).

Keynote

I had to google this because I haven't used a mac since the days of OS 8. Libreoffice maybe? It has presentation software. But I haven't done a presentation in about 10 years so I'm not an authority on this one.

garage band

Ardour. LMMS. Rosegarden. Lots of others.

serious gaming

depends what you mean by "serious". If you're using a mac then you already can't do what I'd call "serious" gaming. But: Steam, GOG, humble store, twitch.io, many great FOSS games. Some of the more "serious" titles include Borderlands, the Civilization games, etc etc. There are about 1500 linux games on steam alone now.

Recently, they received good press for their Azure patents protection offer, but it is not what it seems at first glance, their is nothing benign about it. It's just a dressed up protection racket. [cloudcomputing-news.net]

I don't know what the statistics are now, numbers are very difficult or impossible to find, but around 2000 it was estimated that 97% or so of all computing systems, toasters, pace makers engine controllers, building control, power systems, satellite probes, oil tanker navigation, etc, were not PC or mainframe class computers. iTRON from the university of Tokyo was running was the worlds most popular OS and was running on billions of devices (and nobody ever heard of it). There was something like a 37:1 em

And how many of those Linux devices pay royalties to Microsoft for unnamed or obscure patents? Microsoft didn't give up on the smartphone market, they just found a way to tax the entire market and ensure that Linux is no longer really free.

There are few to none Linux desktops out there, forcing us to install Linux on a formerly windows machine. Sometimes the results are not pretty. I had good luck with Lenovo (in my case M93p, NVIDIA graphics, Small Form Factor -not tiny although that one works too). Still would be good if you could find in your SuperDuper computer store the rig you want, and choose Windows and/or Linux, AND PAY ACCORDINGLY.

Linux is too popular and destroying openess. Let me tell you about the virtues of FreeBSD the free as in beer OS. Yes you heard Free Beer! We got that. It's time to free yourselves to an OS that respects beer. Linux was great growing up in your youth of mountain dew at college after using your Windows training wheels. Now it's time to graduate to free beer Freebsd like a real middle aged man.

Plus no one uses it so you can impress chicks too on being Uber hip. No Google, SystemD, or any other interests other than DARPA giving you TCP/IP which that and ipf make BSD the still defacto network operating system

Have we a choice when going to WorstBuy (TM) and purchasing a desktop computer?

For quite a while they were selling Linux desktops, nobody wanted them. Dell sells their Precision, Latitude, XPS and Inspiron laptops with the option for Linux preinstalled as well. HP offers it on a number of their systems and there are companies like System76 that offer it as well. Not only that it is trivial to install Linux on any machine, even Microsoft's own Surface computers. If people want Linux on their desktop or laptop then it is readily available.